


Day 12: Tooth and Nail

by Crowsister



Series: FFxivWrite2020 [10]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen, Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal Spoilers, Tales from the Shadows spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:22:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26582089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowsister/pseuds/Crowsister
Summary: The Warrior of Light, fueled by a spark of something she shouldn't have, faces off with Ifrit for the first time.
Relationships: Warrior of Light/Thancred Waters
Series: FFxivWrite2020 [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907314
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: #FFxivWrite Final Fantasy 30 Day Writing Challenge - Complete Works





	Day 12: Tooth and Nail

**Author's Note:**

> Set in ARR, but has 5.3 and Tales from the Shadows: Ere Our Curtain Falls in this story's backbone.
> 
> Basically, I was fed and it improved this concept in my mind tenfold.

_ There’s this...this thing about being a hero that nobody tells you about in the books. _

_ Take the dramatic arc. _

_ You have the introduction: _

“People going missing in Thanalan’s never a good sign, Ascian plot or no,” Mahri had said within the Solar of the Waking Sands. “I’ll join Thancred in looking into it.”

_ Then you’ve got the rising action: _

“I’ve got a lead,” Mahri had said as she handed Thancred a paper. “I know it’s not much, but hey, we’ve done more with less, aye?”

“ **You’ve** done more with less.” Thancred’s had lips hooked into a smirk. “Give yourself credit. You’re new to this hero bit, but you’re a  **damn** good one.”

“Ha!” She laughed. “You’re the hero. I’m just a pair of hands.”

He had let it go, thinking there would have been more time to prove her wrong later. He didn’t know she would go missing just three hours later with a whole contingency of Immortal Flames at her back. Who could’ve known?

_ After that, you get to what most folks in the scholarly and play critic circles would call the  _ **_climax_ ** _. This one gets muddied up from time to time, but its core is twofold. _

_ The first is that it’s the most  _ **_intense_ ** _ part of the story. _

Many stories would have this scent of ash, Mahri reflected as she stood in the bowl of embers. An Ishgardian tale about dragon attacks. Or perhaps one about a wildfire gone out of control. This scent of ash, the weight of it, was pervasive in a way that even affected her: the Immortal Flames bound around her were coughing and sniffling, the proudest amongst them trying to die without something as embarrassing and real as a runny nose. The stories don’t tell you about the runny noses from inhaling ash and smoke, after all, nothing as mundane about the struggle: to fight tooth and nail against your own biology to stop yourself from not mirroring the stories’ nobility before you die or are tempered. The most she was getting was a headache.

Mahri had counted about twenty-four tempered Amal’jaa in the arena. She could take five comfortably before moving to the others, but she’d be leaving the other survivors open for the primal to temper since they were in no shape to fight.

“Lord of the Inferno, hearken to our plea!” The Amal’jaa chanted in Amaljic. “Lord of the Inferno, deliver us from our misery!”

Their priest, Temugg Zoh, had the voice of raging bellows. “O mighty Ifrit, Lord of the Inferno! Your humble servants beseech You! Grace us with Your divine presence! O mighty Ifrit! We bring before You ignorant savages who know not Your godhead! If it pleases You, Lord, scorch their heathen souls with Your cleansing flame, and mark them as Your own!

“B-Bloody hells...” muttered the Flame Sargeant to her left.

Behind her, Mahri could hear a hushed conversation. An Amalj'aa Warrior growling, “Bring those two as well!”

Ungust had the semi-unconscious gall to groan, but his partner in crime whimpered, “Wh-What's going on!? Th-This ain't what we agreed!”

“None but servants of Lord Ifrit may behold the rite of summoning. The souls of unbelievers are forfeit!”

Ungust cried out, “Nooo! Spare me, I beg you!”

Ifrit unfurled from the bit of fire aether above them, landing with grace and monstrous intelligence. He snarled, “Pitiful children of man! By my breath, I claim you! Arise once more as my loyal minions! Feed my flames with your faith, and all who stand against us shall burn!”

Mahri kept her eyes open, blue flames washing over her and the rest. But where the Flame soldiers were reduced to gibbering zealots, Mahri stood firm. She licked her teeth clean of the blue flame, slowly turning to the priest.

“Impossible! By what sorcery do you resist my master's will!?” Had he been alone, Mahri could imagine Temugg Zoh on his knees. From all walks of life, men like him turned to this sort of con to control others. And you couldn’t control the flame. “Could it be...? Your soul already belongs to another!? Yes, that is the only explanation!”

Ifrit pushed them all aside, dragging her out to the center of the natural bowl in the earth. “Forsooth,” he snarled, “thy frail mortal frame can serve as vessel to the blessing of but One.” And his sharp, monstrous face grew close, and she felt like the coals of a flame by a pair of inhaling bellows in the hands of an amateur, the inhale through his nose and then the heady exhale. “Yet I smell not the taint of another upon thee...” He rumbled, large claws playing with her this way and that. “The truth of thine allegiance waxeth clear ─ thou art of the godless blessed's number. The Paragons warned of thine abhorrent kind. Thine existence is not to be suffered.”

The fire aether around her was angry: this was fire shaped by a calculating, vicious hand. She could close her eyes, almost seeing the hands of a cloaked figure trace geometrical sigils with eerie precision and grace as she felt the aether within the fire. Reaching out into the fire aether hurt, like being burned.

Ifrit watched her: she knew that without even opening her eyes. She could feel it in his fire. Mahri opened her eyes, staring evenly at him, looking at him sprawled out onto his pile of fire crystals the Amal’jaa had gathered for his summoning.

“From where did you steal thine gifts?” Ifrit asked in Amaljic (or so it sounded to her ears), hovering above her. He laid above her like a bored cavalry lizard, looking at her like she was something he was considering to chew on. “I cannot temper thee.”

“Sure, some folks are metal at their core,” Mahri drawled in Amaljic, “but you can’t make a fire harder or more elastic. You know as well as I that fire just  _ is.” _

“I suppose,” Ifrit replied. He lifted one of his claws (the length of one of his scimitar-like fingers was the length of her whole body and a primordial part of her mind reminded her of this, how he could so easily rip her in half) and put the very tip of it to below her right eye. “Where did thee get the spark of mine sibling, little coal thief?”

“Fuck if I know what you’re talking about.” Mahri grit her teeth as the tip of his claw drug through the skin of her face below her eye, getting closer to it. She couldn’t stop herself from trembling softly.

“I was born from the mind of the Speaker,” Ifrit growled. “I was his rage: my sibling, his passion and compassion. Why is that within thee? From where did the infection you call Hydaelyn pilfer this from?”

“I. Don’t. Know.”

* * *

Thancred could hear the inhuman shriek from afar as he ran. The rage, the desperation, the triumph would haunt him in the days to come. He came upon the bowl, witnessing something.

_ The second role, of a climax in a story, is when one realizes that every scene should contain the five parts of a story within it. This part of the climax’s role is to be a turning point within the narrative. _

Thancred could see Mahri above the burning carcass of Ifrit. He could hear a singular word rumble from the beast’s mouth as it dissolved away.

**“Sister.”**

Mahri turned away. Thancred could not look away from her eyes: they were sharp and  _ glowing. _ Above the trail of blood from cuts along her right eye (the orange one; he’d learn later that they were missed slashes from the beast, all in an attempt to snuff the light of her right eye), he could see the fire burn within her orange eye. The left, which he had come to know as blue, had a burning orange line within it where a black pupil would normally sit.

In her right hand, she had her metal chakram. In her left, an orange crystal, glowing wildly in sync with the fiery flicker of her right eye.

She looked at him. And then...she blinked. Then, everything was normal. His mouth moved before his mind could catch up.

“Pray, forgive my lateness!” He jogged up to her, using the opportunity to examine her again. “I was delayed by a congregation of Amalj'aa zealots. I swear each seemed more evangelical than the last.” Still normal...but a flicker of movement behind her, and he moved before he could reflect further.

He jogged for two beats, then flipped over the Amal’jaa spearman, taking it down with one stroke of his knives. “Hmph! Persistent lot!” He landed, panting slightly. He looked back up to her and found her looking at him like  **he** was the hero. He stood, brushing himself off as if that could stem the tide of guilt within him.

She still hadn’t spoken.

He looked over, swiftly changing the subject. “I see the Bloodsworn wasted no time extracting the captives. No less than I'd expect from the Flame General's handpicked men.” He looked to the two men he knew to be traitors. “As for those two...it is fair to say their hardships have only just begun. They have much to answer for.”

“Damn right,” Mahri softly answered. Her voice was raspy as if she had been inhaling smoke for hours. She might as well had been, Thancred realized in shock and anger (not at her, but at his failings).

Thancred sighed. “I feel I owe you an apology, Mahri.”

“For what?” she asked, her voice swiftly recovering. It was unnerving, the switch from rasp to the same incredulous wonder she always had for anyone who showed her but a mote of consideration.

“Had I known this mission would prove so dangerous, I would never have left you to face it alone.” He reached out, almost putting a hand on her shoulder, but then stopping feeling the heat emanating from her skin like a fire pit. “You have been given a veritable baptism of fire.”

“I was baptized by fire long before you got to me, Waters,” Mahri replied. “We both did what we could with the cards we got. It’s fi-”

Before she could excuse him, Thancred quickly replied, “But let us continue this conversation in more agreeable surrounds. Camp Drybone, shall we say?”

She looked at him sharply and it was hard to forget that strange state he had found her in. Her stare felt like it cut and burned through the facade he was trying to project, and frankly? He hated and welcomed it. It’s not as if he didn’t owe her the right to her own skepticism, at  **least** . 

But before she could say anything, a Flame soldier saved him. It paid to have an audience. “This way, sir!”

He and Mahri looked at each other and, wordlessly, raced each other on foot to the Camp.


End file.
